{"id":2219,"slug":"ohare-ufo-sighting-site-chicago-illinois","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Gate C17, United Airlines, late afternoon on November 7, 2006. Ramp workers, supervisors and at least one pilot watched a dark metallic disc hover over the terminal below the cloud deck — motionless, the witnesses said, for several minutes — and then accelerate straight up with enough speed to punch a visible hole through the overcast. A dozen airline employees saw it. These were people whose job was knowing what aircraft look like."]},{"heading":"The paper trail","paragraphs":["The Federal Aviation Administration initially said it had no report. When the Chicago Tribune filed Freedom of Information requests, the agency's own recordings surfaced — a supervisor's call asking whether anyone had seen the disc — and the FAA revised its position to a weather phenomenon. The Tribune ran the story in January 2007; it became one of the most-read pieces the paper had ever published online. No official investigation followed, and the witnesses did not recant."]},{"heading":"Why the file keeps an airport","paragraphs":["Airports are the opposite of haunted ground — scheduled, surveilled, logged to the minute — which is exactly why this one is in the record. Whatever hung over C17 did so in front of professionals, on the record, at the busiest airport in the country. The gate is still a gate. The sky keeps its own file."]}],"name":"O’Hare UFO sighting site","aliases":[],"type":"AIRPORT","type_label":"Airport","cats":["DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","UFO_LOCATION","MEDIA_REPORTED"],"groups":["historic-sites"],"desc":"November 2006—a disc over Gate C17, witnessed by airline staff.","full_desc":"An airport in Chicago, Illinois, O’Hare UFO sighting site is filed here for what the record attaches to it. November 2006—a disc over Gate C17, witnessed by airline staff. HauntHunt files it with UFO locations, media-reported sites and documented legends. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: O’Hare UFO. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open country — visitable, weather permitting.","address":null,"city":"Chicago","county":null,"state":"Illinois","postal":null,"region":"Midwest","lat":41.9742,"lon":-87.9073,"coord_kind":"EXACT","status":"NATURAL_SITE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"UFO/UAP batch; VERIFY task auto-queued.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":70,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0.85,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":1560,"type":"UFO_ACTIVITY","description":"Airline staff reported a hovering disc that departed through the clouds, leaving a hole. Witnesses name it O’Hare UFO; the name travels further than the proof. The reports at O’Hare UFO sighting site are the site's second history — unofficial, unverified, and stubbornly retold. The press reported it; the reporting is documented, the phenomenon isn't. The report is preserved in sources like '2006 O’Hare UFO sighting'. The sky above the site keeps its own file, and this is the entry that made it famous.","evidence":"MEDIA_REPORTED","evidence_label":"Media reported","entity":"O’Hare UFO","where":null,"first_report":"2006-11","approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":"FAA attributed it to weather phenomena.","source":{"name":"2006 O’Hare UFO sighting","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"The November 7, 2006 sighting by airline employees was reported in the Chicago Tribune in January 2007. The documented date is 2006-11-07. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. '2006 O’Hare UFO sighting' documents the entry. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"2006-11-07","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"2006 O’Hare UFO sighting","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[],"entities":[{"name":"O’Hare UFO","claimed_identity":"O’Hare UFO","verified":null,"summary":"Airline staff reported a hovering disc that departed through the clouds, leaving a hole. O’Hare UFO is what the reports name it. Reports in the file date to 2006-11. O’Hare UFO sighting site in Chicago, Illinois carries the report the way old places do — as part of its identity. A named spirit outlasts an anonymous one; the file's name is O’Hare UFO.","behavior":"Airline staff reported a hovering disc that departed through the clouds, leaving a hole.","area":null,"first_ref":"2006-11","source":{"name":"2006 O’Hare UFO sighting","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Site access varies; verify before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"2006 O’Hare UFO sighting","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":1,"sources":1}}